Capitalizing on Opportunity

When I graduated from high school, I worked for a telemarketing company that sold Sprint Long Distance. I did extremely well and even moved up, having been one of the rare times this happened while working for someone else.

I had a buddy who sat next to me named Gene. We called him Gene, Gene the selling machine. He knew what he was doing and always was quick to tell everyone great day, great day! Gene had a great attitude.

The company would have floor-wide meetings on a daily basis telling us about new products and changes.

On this particular day, payphones were added to our product line. The owner of the payphone got a commission, and it cost them nothing to sign up with Sprint Long Distance. They were all into that and had never had that type of opportunity before.

Gene and I both looked at each other with huge smiles on our faces as we knew we were about to hit the jackpot. We could see our commission checks skyrocketing!

Gene immediately thought of calling convenience stores, but we still needed a way to get their numbers. I had the idea, and we took off to the library at lunch.

One of us stood at the photocopier, and the other grabbed telephone books looking for the convenience store listings. We did that for several days often skipping lunch totally.

When we got back, we hid our lists in our top desk drawer keeping others from knowing how we were operating our strategy.

The sales instantly flew in; we were selling every single customer we called, and our calling ratios fell apart. It was annoying having to take the time to write up the sale as we just wanted to get back on the phone.

Our supervisor loved it, but as you can imagine, the rest of the floor was fit to be tied. They wanted us stopped because they thought we were cheating. The truth was, we weren't cheating. The company allowed us to call our leads if we thought they were qualified businesses.

Enough people complained that management told us we had to call out of the system, but our supervisor said to call our leads like every 5th call. Unfortunately, that still didn't slow down our sales, and there were so many people mad about this, the company finally shut us down.

From then on, we had to call out of the system. Our sales went back down, but not as far as they were before we started this journey. Our excitement and self-confidence became so intense that we still were always in the top salespeople.

So, were we cheating? Nope! We didn't break any rules; we just played all the cards available at the right time.

Was it unethical? Nope!

The customer got a great deal; we got a sale, the company made a bunch of money off our strategy. Everyone won, and the only people that were complaining were people that had nothing to do with the transaction.

We were passionate about our strategy and that's what drove us to our success.